By the time I reached the fourth grade, Diane Keaton had already cemented herself as my preferred romantic heroine. Snow White and The Sound of Music’s Maria von Trapp paled in comparison to Erica Barry, the 50-something divorced playwright at the center of Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give (2003)—coincidentally, one of the four DVDs my now 80-year-old grammy owned in the pre-streaming era.
Even in my prepubescent state (or perhaps because of it), something about Keaton’s version of falling in love in the movies resonated. Maybe it was the way she so openly resented Jack Nicholson’s aging playboy, Harry. While laid up in her Hamptons home after a heart attack, Harry asks Erica, “What’s with the turtlenecks?” She curtly replies: “I like ’em. I’ve always liked ’em, and I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal,” flippantly waving her hands in a way that’s always stuck with me. He then wants to know if she ever gets hot—and all that implies. “No,” Keaton’s character snaps, dismissively adding, “Not lately.” But there is also a hint of possibility—something Erica allows herself to express in the play she’s writing, but not the life she’s living.
Later in the film, the shedding of that same article of clothing signifies Erica’s sexual reawakening. “Cut it off,” she tells Harry, handing him a pair of scissors so he can slice open the beige turtleneck from navel to neck. With each inch of skin revealed, she breathes a little easier. “Erica, you are a woman to love,” Nicholson’s character rasps. And so was the woman who played her. “Diane Keaton, arguably the most covered up person in the history of clothes, is also a transparent woman,” as Meryl Streep once put it. “There’s nobody who stands more exposed, more undefended, and just willing to show herself inside and out than Diane.”
